


Paradigm Shift

by Littleviolentone



Series: Anger of a Gentle Man [4]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Babies, Badass Mac, Cage is a Good Friend, F/M, Feelings Realization, Flirting, Fluff, How Do I Tag, In this house we love and respect Samantha Cage, Introspection, Riley POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23210182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littleviolentone/pseuds/Littleviolentone
Summary: “How much do you know about babies anyway, Mac?” she asked, her voice just a little too shaky to be normal.“Not nearly enough,” he answered, still checking the child for injuries. His hands shook like he was scared he might break her. “How are we supposed to do this Riles? I think she’s okay, but I don’t know. What do we do if we run into trouble? We can’t fight. I can’t make a bomb or anything else I normally would without putting her at risk. How am I supposed to get you both out of here? I don’t know what to do.”
Relationships: Riley Davis/Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016)
Series: Anger of a Gentle Man [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1648357
Comments: 11
Kudos: 182





	Paradigm Shift

**Author's Note:**

> So the idea of Mac holding a baby, and having no clue what to do struck me and simply would not let go. I am challenging my fellow fic writers to take this trope and make it your own. Mac with a baby for whatever reason, go nuts, lets see what you guys come up with.
> 
> Love,  
> Little Violent One

“You seem to have pretty high expectations of me,” he had shouted to her over the wind. His body was warm and solid cradled between her arms and legs on the bike. “I just hope you give me the chance one day to see if I live up to all your expectations!”

God! Who said stuff like that? Who managed to form a response to a crack about multiple orgasms that somehow managed to be equal parts sexy confidence and respectful shyness? 

Angus Goddamn MacGyver, that’s who.

If it had been up to Riley she would have given him the chance to…. “live up to her expectations” as soon as they got back home. But no, after the debrief and required medical check, there was another crisis and suddenly Mac’s off to Whales of all places.

It went on like that for a while, one emergency after another. They were either on opposite ends of the planet from each other, or they were completing the mission while breathing through a nice thick layer of sexual tension. It had been hell, and not just for her if Macs face was anything to go by. Which was of some comfort at least.

But when they managed to somehow have a little down time together, nothing happened. Sure there were little touches to her waist or arms. He found excuses to touch her hair all the time, or to play with her fingers when no one was watching. But no matter how much they both wanted to, he never took it any further.

Riley wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for. She thought that they were on the same page after Venezuela. Remembering him undoing his jeans and letting water run down his chest had kept her up for more than a few nights. Apparently putting cameras in her house for the sole purpose of teasing him during the mission by parading around in skimpy clothes wasn’t enough of a green light. The boy was supposed to be a genius, Riley was having some doubts.

It wasn’t until her next video call with Cage that Mac’s behavior started to make a little sense. The two women had kept in touch whenever they could, and there was no point in lying to someone like Cage, so Riley found herself venting instead. It hadn’t taken much prodding to get her to spill, but Riley pretended not to notice the amused glint to her friends eyes.

“He’s still flirting with me,” she ranted. “If anything he’s doing it more. Bozer actually noticed that time, and we’ve been annoying Desi for a couple weeks! I don’t get what he’s waiting for.”

“Riley,” Cage said gently. “He’s waiting for you.” she sighed at the hackers confused look and elaborated. “Mac is a very cerebral guy. In the past few months your relationship with him has undergone several massive paradigm shifts. He already respected and admired you. You’ve become each other’s touchstones back to center. He has defended and supported you, and now has clearly taken a romantic and sexual interest in you.”

“And all of that is true for me as well,” Riley exclaimed. “So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that Mac approaches everything with his mind first, but sometimes his heart overrules it. Look, you know how observant he is, he knows you want him. What’s probably stopping him is not knowing if all of these shifts to your relationship means that you both feel the same way, or if your just gravitating towards one another out of a desire for stability.”

He’s scared? Riley hadn’t considered that, but it made sense. He was scared, and the more she thought about it, so was she. Her way of dealing with the constantly changing terrain of her life was apparently to try and rush right into a physical relationship with Mac. But he deserved better than that from her.

“So what do I do Sam?” she dropped her head to scrub one hand through her tangled black hair.

“You take a step back and you ask yourself, honestly, what do you want?” Cage gave her answer bluntly. “Do you want a relationship and all that that entails with him? Do you want the man as a whole, or just the parts of him that make up your partner? Or do you just want to get laid really badly and Mac’s your safest option since you broke up with Billy? And when you have all of those answers you go talk to him. It will work out, or it won’t, but either way you’ll both be able to finally break this holding pattern you’ve dropped yourselves in.”

“I think you’re right.” she conceded softly.

“Of course I am,” came the very quick agreement. God, she had missed Cage. “Now, tell me exactly how you all convinced Bozer that ‘Drag Queen’ was a viable cover identity, because these pictures require so much more explanation.”

The next mission gave Riley all the answers she needed.

Matty had sent the four of them to respond to a distress call from an American diplomat in Greece. A group of pirates had kidnapped the Ambassador’s daughter in an attempt to control the American fleet in the area. The woman was nearly hysterical with worry, and who could blame her? Riley didn’t think even Jack would have been able to find a joke to make about pirates, not after hearing that the Ambassador’s daughter was just two months old.

Bozer had been the one to figure out that the little girl, Lily, was probably being kept on land. Babies that young needed a lot, and the kidnapper’s stated goal was to ransom her for control of the fleet, not to kill her. So they would want to keep her as safe as possible, and a pirate ship just was not a sensible place to do that.

With the life of a baby on the line, it took Riley a couple hours longer than she would have liked to find the two most likely places for Lily to be kept. One was a house near the harbor that they had used before for smuggling. The other was an old villa set back in an isolated section of mountain forest.

Matty gave the order to divide and conquer. Desi went to the harbor with one of the Ambassador’s security team, as she was the best person to handle a house full of pirates one-on-one. Mac and Riley went to the old villa where Mac’s wilderness survival experience was better suited. Bozer stayed with the Ambassador, in case of further ransom demands.

Riley hated mountains. They were always cold, there was never any easy way to cross them, and they always managed to block the signal to their coms, and usually cell and sat connections as well. Mountains belonged on the horizon or in landscape paintings only. Why the hell anyone would choose to live on a mountain was beyond her. But here she went to some bad guy’s house in the mountains to rescue a baby that had been kidnapped by pirates with the guy that she might be in love with, because of course this was her life now.

The house wasn’t nearly as big as Riley would have thought something called a villa should be, but that didn’t make it small either. Two stories, twenty rooms, and just a few too many guards to make either of them comfortable. 

Mac managed to sneak them both inside through a side door that had been partially obscured by a stack of very old wooden delivery crates. Once inside they found themselves in a kitchen with a very stunned looking guard who almost immediately reached for his radio. Mac was on him before he could even touch it.

In a matter of seconds Mac had knocked the radio out of his hand, and had him in a submission hold, but the guard was still struggling. Riley moved to help, but it didn’t matter. In a move so fast he almost blurred, Mac had spun the man around, broke his nose, and bounced his head off the old stone wall with a sickening thud.

The guard immediately crumpled to the ground and Mac knelt down to search him tossing his phone to Riley. She was tense and silent as she worked, both of them waiting to see if the noise of the fight would be enough to draw unwanted attention on themselves.

She signaled Mac that there was nothing of use on the phone, they would have to start their search of the house blind. Mac flatly refused to split up when she suggested it. He said it was too dangerous with so many unknown variables in play. She tried to argue that splitting up would be faster, but he wouldn’t hear it. She was starting to get angry at his seeming lack of common sense for the first time on a mission, but it was cut off at the knees when he spoke again.

“Please don’t make me let you out of my sight here,” he whispered in case the were heard, and she had to strain a little to hear. “I work better with you, and if you’re by my side then I know you’re safe.”

She swallowed past the emotions clogging her throat and nodded. His eyes held that same look from the night he’d held her together after she’d broken up with Billy; seemingly equal parts rage, desperation, and tenderness. That look had scared her then and it scared her now, but she was starting to realize that she was the only one she ever wanted him to look at like that. 

With a quick squeeze of his hand to let him know she understood, they began a room-by-room search for the baby. The house was old and beautiful, the kind of place Riley wouldn’t have minded exploring if it hadn’t been crawling with pirates who were leveraging the life of a two month old so they could try and strong arm the U.S. Navy. As it was they had to duck into empty doorways every few minutes to avoid detection, and Mac ended up having to disable two more guys as they went.

In a corner bedroom on the second floor, they found her. The tiny little girl had been left all alone and crying in a travel bassinet. Riley’s heart broke for her even as she struggled to keep her rage on the child’s behalf in check.

Mac moved first towards the bassinet, jaw clenched and shoulders tight, clearly struggling with his own anger. Slowly he reached out and picked her up, awkwardly trying to arrange his arms so that the baby had support but he could still look her over for injury or illness. He managed to lay her along his left forearm and cradled her little body to his chest.

He looked absolutely terrified. Riley got the idea that he hadn’t had much experience with children this young. He moved like he was holding a motion sensitive bomb he couldn’t jostle instead of a fussy little girl. Riley moved closer as Mac brought his hand up to brush through the dark hair on her little head, she looked absurdly tiny in his arms.

“Hey there, Princess” he spoke softly, in a tone she had never heard him use before. “It’s alright. It’s gonna be alright now, Lily.” Mac kept talking to her and eventually her fussing stopped as she stared up at her new protector with wide innocent eyes that couldn’t decide if they wanted to be green or blue.

Watching him with the baby, Riley was struck hard with an overwhelming sense of longing. Wanting Mac was not a new feeling for her, but this was a different kind of want. She had never really given much thought to kids. She liked them well enough, would sit and play with them if she had the opportunity, but had never really wanted any of her own. Didn’t really think she’d be any good at it given her own childhood. But watching Mac with Lily she knew, if ever she were to change her mind and choose to be a mother, it would most likely be with Mac at her side.

That thought was all kinds of terrifying, so Riley set herself the task of gathering the meager baby supplies from the room into her backpack as a distraction. They had incapacitated three men on their way up here, that would be noticed sooner or later.

“How much do you know about babies anyway, Mac?” she asked, her voice just a little too shaky to be normal.

“Not nearly enough,” he answered, still checking the child for injuries. His hands shook like he was scared he might break her. “How are we supposed to do this Riles? I think she’s okay, but I don’t know. What do we do if we run into trouble? We can’t fight. I can’t make a bomb or anything else I normally would without putting her at risk. How am I supposed to get you both out of here? I don’t know what to do.”

Riley was across the room in an instant. One hand reaching out to help him support Lily’s little head, the other threading through his hair to cradle his as she pushed up on her toes to press their foreheads together. Mac took a shaky breath and relaxed into her hold, getting a better and better hold of himself as she stroked his hair.

“You’re not doing this alone, Mac. We are gonna keep her safe and get her home, together. And I know that because it’s you and me, and together we’re unbeatable.” He huffed a fragile laugh and caught her in his hypnotic blue gaze.

“Okay,” he sighed. One arm let go of Lily and wrapped around her waist. “You and me.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead, seemingly without thinking, and she felt her heart stop.

Then he was all motion. He passed Lily gently into her arms so he had both hands free and started gathering blankets and tearing them into strips with his knife. Riley watched in a daze having done all she could do, there were no other baby things to pack and no way to contact Matty while in the goddamn mountains, so she did her best to keep Lily quiet. It wasn’t hard, the little girl seemed fascinated with Riley’s hair.

Mac had created some sort of harness for the baby out of the blankets that both kept her supported and kept the wearers hands free. They had a brief argument over who should carry the baby. Riley eventually won saying that Mac was the better fighter of the two of them and it would be easier to defend the both of them without a baby strapped to his chest. Mac agreed on the condition that he carry her backpack, which she allowed. 

Getting out was far more stress full than getting in. About halfway down the stairs someone raised an alarm and they had to run. Riley found that her typical fear during an escape was far more intense now that she had a helpless little girl depending her. Mac fought a path through the guards, keeping his body between the danger and them. Normally Riley would help him fight off their attackers, but with Lily in her arms they both agreed that she shouldn’t risk fighting unless Mac went down.

They made it outside with Lily screaming, Riley panting, and Mac bleeding from his knuckles and mouth. The atv that they had come up the mountain on was in the yard, guarded and too far away to risk getting to. But apparently Mac had a plan as he pressed her into the side of the house with a hurried “stay down” and ran off.

In minutes they were found by one of the pirates, Riley could feel a scream working it’s way up her throat, but never got a chance to use it. Mac was there behind their attacker, breaking one of the wooden crates they had seen over the man’s head before wrenching his neck around with a horrible crunch.

Lily was going into hysterics against her chest, and Mac was alternately yelling directions or simply pulling her along, it was everything Riley could do just to keep up. Somehow Mac managed to get them to the stables and onto horse, and then his arms were around her and it felt like they were flying.

Riley didn’t typically like horseback riding, but her mind was almost entirely taken up with the task of trying to calm Lily down. Not a simple goal to achieve on the back of a horse going full gallop through a dark forest. 

Exhaustion eventually overtook the little girl who settled into sleep with a pitiful whimper against Riley’s heart. When she was finally able to look up Riley saw that Mac had directed the now walking horse into the stream, to avoid leaving tracks she assumed. She leaned back into Mac’s chest and felt him move to cradle her more comfortably.

“So what’s the plan?” she mumbled softly, wary of both possible tails, and of waking the baby.

“We need to find some place to lay low tonight, rest up, and hope we made it far enough down the mountain that we can get a signal to Matty in the morning,” he whispered back against her ear. She didn’t bother trying to control the shiver that ran down her spine in reaction, and was rewarded with his arms tightening around her.

Maybe an hour later Mac had set up camp for them in a shallow cave. The horse was resting. After some frustration they had figured out how to change Lily’s diaper, and give her a bottle, then Riley laid the baby down in the upside-down saddle Mac had re-purposed into a crib. Backpack in hand Riley moved over to where he was setting traps in front of the cave. 

“Mac, come here,” she called just loud enough to be heard. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” He tried to politely brush her off, but she wasn’t having it. She got him inside the cave, under the beam of her flashlight, and started cleaning up his cuts and bruises one at a time as he sat grumpily on a rock waiting for her to finish. After so many missions, Riley had a pretty good first aid kit in her backpack at all times. 

His knuckles on both hands needed to be taped. She had to put a butterfly closure on a gash above his left eye, but there was nothing she could do for his split lip except clean it. She had to argue with him again to convince him to take off his shirt and let her check his torso for wounds.

“Thank you,” he said quietly as she was taping a gauze square over what was clearly a knife wound across his ribs.

“For what?” she asked distractedly as she tried to remind herself that the cut was shallow.

“For keeping me centered back there,” he explained, eyes on the ground. “I was spinning out and you pulled me back, so thank you.” He sounded so unbelievably sad. 

Riley moved until she was kneeling between his spread feet, taking his face in her hand so he had no choice but to look her in the eye.

“Mac, you saved my life today, and you saved her life,” she pointed to the baby. “You never have to thank me for talking you down. You have done the same for me and more so many times, so I will do this as many times as you need it and you will never owe me one ounce of gratitude in return.”

“Why?” he asked, looking genuinely confused as to why someone would do this for him, would be willing to care for him so freely.

That was when it all came together for her. All their close calls and saves, all their little touches and teases, every single time they did the impossible together, Riley knew the reason. And now that she had worked it out, she couldn’t keep it to herself.

“Because I love you, Angus MacGyver. I think maybe I’ve loved you since you broke me out of super-max.” 

Mac was frozen in shock for a fraction of a second, then suddenly Riley’s legs were on either side of his hips, his hands were fisted in her hair, and her lips were engaged in the most intense kiss of her life. Mac was all lips and hands and teeth and tongue, and Riley was clinging to his shoulders not caring what he did to her as long as he didn’t stop. He tasted like blood and sunlight, and she would never have enough.

It took her a few minutes, or maybe it was a few hours, to discover that anytime he broke their kiss he moved to whisper “I love you” into her skin under her jaw and down her neck.

She would have happily stayed in Mac’s lap for the rest of the night, but Lily chose that moment to start fussing again. Mac dropped his head on her shoulder with an out of breath chuckle.

“I think our girl needs some attention.” he rasped into her ear, laughing when she shivered. He stood up with her still clutched to his chest, letting her legs drop from his hips to stand on the ground. “I’ll get her.”

Riley watched, transfixed, as Mac lifted Lily out of the saddle. He was still a little awkward with getting her into position, but he held her much easier. For her part, Lily calmed down almost as soon as she was pressed into Mac’s still bare chest.

“Is that better, Princess?” he asked in that calm gentle tone he used with the baby. “Did you just need someone to pay attention to you?” He sat against the wall of the cave, keeping up a steady stream of nonsense for the little one as he looked back at Riley grinning.

“How’s our girl doing?” she asked. Intentionally using the same title for Lily that he had to see if it made his heart melt like it had hers. She wasn’t let down, he looked absolutely wrecked.

“She’s still a little lonely, I think,” he held out an arm in invitation, which she gladly accepted. Riley fit herself into Mac’s side, careful of his ribs, and laid her arm alongside Mac’s across the child’s back. She was asleep again in minutes, giving them the chance to talk about everything that had been building up between them since she’d been poisoned. The last thing Riley heard before drifting off herself was a low voice rumbling the words “I love you” across her scalp.

The next morning they managed to get their location out to Matty after only a couple hours of riding down the mountain side. Thirty minutes later Desi came swooping into a clearing by helicopter, looking a little beat up, but happy to see them.

Lily emphatically DID NOT like riding in the helicopter, but to everyone’s great surprise Desi was an absolute baby whisperer. She had her cleaned, fed, and in new clothes in short order, and by the time the chopper touched down at the Ambassador’s house, she had even started grinning a gummy little grin at them.

Desi handed Lily back to Mac just in time for her mother to come running out to meet them in tears. When parents and child were finally reunited, the baby given a clean bill of health, and everyone had been thanked profusely for their part in the rescue, Matty gave the order to come back home. They were just loading on to the Phoenix jet when Riley felt warm breath tickle the back of her neck and a hand trailing lightly up her spine. 

“So now that we’ve cleared the air a bit,” Mac breathed into the skin behind her ear. He seemed to delight in making her shiver. “Maybe we could go back to that conversation we started about me meeting your expectations?” Riley fought back the urge to giggle like a middle school girl.

“I am more than happy to have that conversation with you Mac,” she tossed a wicked smirk over her shoulder at him. “Just as soon as your ribs heal up.” 

Her teasing laughter melted into a quiet moan as she felt one of his wide warm hands close firmly over her hip. His thumb began edging under the back of her shirt to run along the smooth skin over her spine.

“My ribs feel fine, Riles.” 

"Thank god," her moan was answered by his dark throaty chuckle as they boarded the plane.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so I want to be clear, Riley doesn't suddenly have baby fever. What I was trying to show here was that the idea of imagining herself with kids wasn't so scary if the kids were also Mac's and that realization is what makes her realize she's in love with him. I wanted to use the baby as the emotional trigger for her, but I didn't want to change her whole personality. Hopefully I did okay. 
> 
> Love,  
> Little Violent One


End file.
